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This reminded me of Gates' "The Road Ahead" book (late 90s if I recall) prediction that marketers would eventually be able to pay a dime to get an email in your inbox, if only the future economy could figure out micro-transactions.

I agree with you that we're moving away from banner ads to some novel way of monetizing traffic, and therefore content published by authentic human beings.

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Back in the late 90’s we were at a tipping point of how to monetize the world wide web. It turned out that selling advertising was way easier than figuring out micropayments. Advertising turned into a billions of dollar business. Facebook then turned the World Wide Web into a snooping platform. We then moved into a global propaganda engine on a mass scale.

I wonder if micropayments had been solved before taking the easy route, we would have been in a much more healthy global scenario today.

What if people could choose to donate their devices' computing power in return for some Netcoin or whatever?

You can do this. Several services pay you real money (not much) in exchange for letting AI scrapers use you as a proxy. It's completely legal (AFAIK).

Not my internet connection, just the CPU/GPU/RAM, just when it's charging, and so on

Or those could be separate options

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